Facebook’s New Job Search App Will Rule Us All

Facebook plays a huge role in the job market. Recruiters and grad-school admissions teams consult Facebook to check up on their prospective employees and students. In fact about half of all employers are using Facebook for hiring these days. Facebook can also apparently predict how you’ll perform on the job. The site has become so dominant that employers are actually suspicious of people without accounts. And now that you can hired through Facebook, you can also get fired there, too. But if you think Facebook already controls your life, get ready: On Wednesday, the company made it official and launched its own job-search function.

The new Social Jobs App gathers 1.7 million job listings from a variety of job boards, including Monster and Jobvite, and puts them all in one place. “We know that the power of social media – the connections between friends, family and community – can have an outsized impact on finding jobs,” the company said in a statement. The initiative got help from the Department of Labor, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, and several other large institutions.

The app is seen by some as Facebook’s attempt to compete with LinkedIn, and indeed, LinkedIn’s stock shares fell by 3% when Facebook announced the new job board. Then again, there’s a reason people like to keep their “real” lives (that is, their Facebook lives) separate from their professional lives. Even if you’re not posting topless party photos, do you want to be formally job-searching in the same space you joke with your friends and post snippy political comments on high-school acquaintance’s election posts?

As the Wall Street Journal found when it tooled around with the app, there are still quite a few bugs in the system. The search function turns up weird results, and sometimes nothing at all. But bugs can be worked out. People do just about everything on Facebook these days, so I wouldn’t bet against the idea that we’ll soon be using it for most of our job-searching, too.